BIOGRAPHY
Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, USA, 1951. Lives in New York
2008 Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking, The Drawing Center, New York; 2008 Whitney Biennial
2007 Matt Mullican, Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna; Centre Pompidou, Paris
2006 Matt Mullican, Talking the Talk, Walking the Walk, Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
Selected Bibliography MULLICAN, Matt,
Model Architecture (cat.), Linz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, 2006;
Matt Mullican: That Person’s Workbook, United Kingdom, Ridinghouse and MER, 2006.
INTERVIEW
Giancarlo Hannud: You once said that the project you will be presenting at the 28th Bienal de São Paulo – MIT Project – “duplicates an artificial world in much the same way a school does.” What do you mean by this?
Matt Mullican: The
MIT Project that will be presented in the 28th Bienal is not a reproduction of the piece first shown in Boston in 1991. Anything can go into it. Some of the objects included in the structure are the same as when the piece was first shown but others are from last year. You could say the
MIT Project is a map, a way of organizing information. The structure itself is one-meter high, so you can see over it as well as enter it. You never know which area the objects will go into. It is not about the thing itself but rather about how we interpret that thing. It is a way of cataloging the work that I produce.
The structure itself resembles a game board, something like a football field, or basketball court. There are five basic areas in it; one end is green and deals with materiality and physical properties, the elements. The other end is red and is about subjectivity and our relation to physical properties. You could say it has to do with the psyche. Blue is the world unframed. The section in the middle of the structure is yellow, the world framed – this is where things change from objects into ideas. Black-and-white is language.
Giancarlo Hannud: You have been working with a strict set of colors – red, green, blue, yellow, black and white – since the ’70s. Why impose such formal restrictions to your work?
Matt Mullican: Things gain their value through their being. That is what makes a sign important, its being used. If I changed my system every two years it would simply fall apart. It is better for me to have this strict use of colors. Those five colors represent as much as I can come up with. I have five different worlds in my work and each is represented by a different color. I do not change the colors at all, they are endless; I can always fall into it, and it is also a way for me to structure my work. Since I am constantly dealing with abstracts I need the solidity of a system to fall back on.
Giancarlo Hannud: By attempting to catalog and represent symbolically everything there is in the world, you seem to be in tune with Diderot and the encyclopédistes of the 18th century. Why embark on a project that aims at nothing less than the organization of the world, or our perception and translation of it, when it seems to be a failed one from the outset?
Matt Mullican: It is the idea of somehow holding onto the world. Technology has expanded so much today that there exists no possibility of having a library holding it all. The Internet and all the libraries in the world could not hold all of the information in the world, we have to accept this. It is an impossibility, but we still possess the will to collect. All you have to do is ask a coin or stamp collector; the impulse to gather still exists, even though it is a failed attempt if one is really trying to do it. In my work I am somehow representing, or trying to represent everything. It is more the idea of doing it rather than the thing itself that interests me. The desire to collect, whatever it may be, is a very basic one and not at all useless.
Giancarlo Hannud is an art historian and acted as a curatorial assistant at the 28TH Bienal de São Paulo. He lives in
São Paulo.
Projects with updated content
